03:02 am - Deep History & The Exponential Growth of KnowledgeLike many of you, I recently read an article about the discovery of Gobekli Tepe, an 11,000 year old temple in Turkey. This article is fascinating, but here's a considerably more well informed discussion of this site and what it means. As one archaeologist mentions in the first article: "There's more time between Gobekli Tepe and the Sumerian clay tablets [etched in 3300 B.C.] than from Sumer to today,", and the 2nd article mentions that Gobekli Tepe comes from very shortly before the time when some humans started getting most of their food from agriculture. This ancient site come from the time when humans were taking the first steps to be more than just another in a long line of hominids that lived as hunter gatherers.

11,000 years ago, all humans lived still lived in nomadic bands and while there was already long distance trade, the only way to pass on knowledge was to talk to someone and even traders rarely encountered more than a few hundred people. It was a life based on of limits to knowledge & communication that we really cannot imagine. However, the people who built Gobekli Tepe were taking the first steps towards making a larger and far more complex society with an unimaginably greater knowledge base.

"By mid-2010, there will be 6.8 billion humans on this planet. According to United Nations estimates, there also will be five billion cellphone subscriptions. These are astonishing numbers. What is still more astonishing, and hopeful, is the breadth of change this number reflects.

The United Nations says that right now 80 percent of the world’s population has available cell coverage. The fastest adoption of cellphone use is occurring in some of the world’s poorest places.

Now that cellphones have spread across the globe, according to the first article on cellphones, the next change is starting to take place: "This year, the number of mobile broadband subscribers — people who access the Internet via laptops or mobile phones — is forecast to pass one billion, up from 600 million at the end of 2009.". As smaller, faster, and cheaper chips start to come out, smartphone prices are dropping fast, and it's very likely that for many people in the third world, in less than five years a basic smartphone will be cheaper than a laptop, and also more convenient. Perhaps in a decade we'll have more than half the planet equipped with near constant access to much of the amassed knowledge of the planet.